Song of the day: Splendid – "Come Clean"

I was almost not going to play you today’s song because of the swearing in it. (One rant coming up…)

I’m really not much of a fan of swearing. To me, it’s an indication of a limited vocabulary – can’t people think of other words to say? I tend to sigh disappointedly when an artist starts dropping f-bombs (or something similar) in a song. I usually frown and wonder if they could have used their imaginations to come up with something more creative – something other than a clumsy and ineffective attempt at “shocking” people, or being “real” with their “street talk,” or something else I can’t think of at the moment that requires me to use “inverted commas”.

Rant over.

Now, back to today’s song.

Splendid is an Australian duo currently residing in Los Angeles. It’s singer Angie Hart (pictured above) partnered by her husband Jesse Tobias. Angie’s been in a few bands (such as the wonderfully-named Holidays On Ice), but her most notable success was with her first band, Frenté!, who had a run of hits in the 80’s with songs like “Ordinary Angels” and “Accidently Kelly Street.” (“Accidently…” was Song of the day a while back.)

Today’s song, “Come Clean,” was Splendid’s second single. It does contains swearing (hence the rant), but I have to admit that I find it justifiable in this particular song because it’s actually an integral part of the lyrics (you’ll know what I mean when you hear the song), as Angie sings about her admission of infidelity. And another thing: because Angie sings with an angelic and totally beguiling voice, the swearing ends up sounding utterly inoffensive.

Okay, now that I’ve got all that out of the way (i.e., my objections to swearing in pop songs and elsewhere but sticking up for Angie’s artistic cussin’), here’s Splendid with “Come Clean”:

As a bonus, here’s the ‘DNA Remix’ of “Come Clean”. One unusual aspect of this version is that it doesn’t have any swearing in it. I don’t quite know why. I had originally thought that maybe Splendid revised the lyrics in this version to garner radio airplay, but then I thought that may not be the reason because, as far as I can tell, a lot of artists nowadays try to include swearing in their songs so that the swearing will get bleeped for the radio which would (theoretically) result in increased sales because of all those teenyboppers listening to the bleeps and saying to their friends, “Wow, I gotta buy the unedited version! It’s so naughty!”